I purchased some charcoal sticks from an estate sale recently. They are packaged in a lovely old-fashioned box - I am not sure how old they are. They are the soft, brittle charcoal (willow charcoal, I think). They really inspired me to get down and do some charcoal drawings, which I have avoided for ages because whenever I did try they never seemed to have any resemblance to my paintings. I thought I would, because of this problem, do a charcoal drawing of one of my actual paintings as a study, but it evolved into its own image and became a study for a new painting revisiting the them of
South African Woman.
It is charcoal on paper, 15" x 16" (although I cropped it here to fit the 400 x 600 pixel requirement).
A full-size image can be viewed
here .